


tell me that you're alright

by orphan_account



Series: Checking In [4]
Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: ADHD, Alcoholism, Anxiety, Codependency, Delusions, Eating Disorders, M/M, Mental Illness, Personality Disorders, Substance Abuse, Suicide Attempt, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-02-28 13:50:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2734901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Mac,” Dennis said. “Do you ever miss having feelings?”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 16-19

**Author's Note:**

> Massive trigger warning on this story. It's directly about the mental illness of both Mac and Dennis, and I don't really dance around anything. Alongside every issue already brought up in the show (particularly drug use/abuse and addictions/poor coping mechanisms), trigger warning for a suicide attempt.

**16**

Mac was used to spending time with weird people. After all, he hung out with Charlie, who frequently got high on glue and looked for ghouls in his basement. His other two members of the crew, Dooley and Pete, never really seemed normal either. Dooley could hardly stay awake a lot of the time, and Pete notoriously had a violent streak and a psychotic gleam in his eye.

A couple weeks into being friends with Dennis, Mac realized he was weird too. It took him longer because unlike the others, Dennis seemed desperate to hide it. He bragged about his popularity, and when the popular kids wouldn’t hang out with him, he claimed they were beneath him anyway. According to Dennis, his body was sculpted to the proportions of a God, and yet he was constantly obsessed with imperfections in his appearance. Dennis was always the one to smile and laugh too hard, and it never really reached his eyes. Mac had never really met someone fucked up who was trying to hide it this desperately.

One early morning, Mac and Dennis were smoking alone underneath the bleachers. It was early autumn and chilly. The damp grass soaked into Mac’s clothes as he smoked on his back, watching the grey vapor disappear as it billowed into the faintly purple sky. He passed the joint to Dennis, who took it but didn’t smoke. Instead he flopped his hand to the ground, and just let it burn for a while.

“Mac,” he said. “Do you ever miss having feelings? When you’re not high, I mean.”

Mac turned on his side to face him. He thought for a minute that Dennis was just messing with him, but he looked dead serious.

“I have feelings all the time. Every day.”

“Why do you get high then?” asked Dennis. He turned to face Mac, their bodies close enough to share body heat, the conversation intimate.

Nobody else ever asked Mac questions like this.

“I guess I don’t like the feelings that I have sometimes.”

Dennis nodded, and rolled back onto his back. He finally brought the joint to his lips, and inhaled deeply. On exhale, he closed his eyes.

“It’s probably good that I don’t have any then,” he said. Mac didn’t know how to respond, but Dennis was already holding the joint in his direction. He didn’t expect him to say anything else.

The two of them smoked together in silence until the sky was a bright, blinding white. Dennis didn’t bring up the issue again for a long, long time.

**17**

Mac ran hot. He was unpredictable, uncontrolled, and never, ever sat still. In class (when he went) he always talked and laughed loudly with Charlie. The two of them shot spitballs at teachers and flew paper airplanes. They had been suspended more times than Dennis could count, and it didn’t even bother them. Charlie lied to his mom about where he was on suspension days, but Mac didn’t even have to. His mom didn’t care either way.

Dennis liked this about Mac, liked that he threw rocks at trains and started fights against people much bigger than him. There was a driving energy in Mac that Dennis just didn’t have, unfocused and often misplaced, but raw and animal all the same. Mac cared about his appearance and his reputation, and he was often scared of stupid shit, but his intensity in the moments where his feelings got the better of him proved that he had potential.

He made it his goal to focus Mac. If he could just do that, they would be an unstoppable dynamic duo, capable of anything. Dennis had little doubt in his capabilities; he had learned how to press Dee’s buttons perfectly years before. The first step was learning how to calm the person down. Learning how to fire someone up was easy if you could do the reverse.

As luck would have it, that very afternoon Dennis got his chance to try it out. They were drinking in Dennis’s basement, and Dee had been allowed to join them. Dee and Mac hated each other. When they were in the same room together, it was a ticking time bomb. Perfect.

Dee tried to stand up, but was too drunk and fell over. She squawked hilariously as she fell down, aluminum clanking against the floor, and Mac burst into peals of laughter.

“You sound just like a bird.”

“She does,” Dennis agreed. “Were you on your way to your cage, Dee?”

Mac laughed harder. “No she’s already in a cage!”

She shot Mac a withering look. “At least I’m not gay! Why don’t you two just go suck each other off?”

Mac reacted so quickly that Dennis didn’t even have time to process it. He was on top of Dee, strangling her and banging her head against the floor.

“TAKE IT BACK YOU BITCH!”

Dennis grabbed at Mac, and pulled him away. He dragged him to the other side of the room, and put his hands on his face.

“Look at me. Look me in the eyes.”

Mac was breathing hard, as if he was the one who had been choked. He looked into Dennis’s eyes, his own animal and wild.

“She called me gay,” he said, darting his eyes over to her.

“Shhh. Shh. Look at me buddy. You got a little hot.” Dennis stroked his hair.

“I got. . .I got so hot,” said Mac.

“I know.”

The two of them stood like this, breathing each other’s air and making eye contact for a long time. Dee ran up the stairs, and slammed the door.

“I’m ok now,” said Mac, finally looking away. “Thanks for getting me out of that jam.”

“Any time buddy, any time.”

Later, after progressing from beer to shots, they laid close to each other and shared the same air for the second time that night. Dennis closed the gap and pressed a soft kiss onto Mac’s mouth. His eyes fluttered shut, and he hummed happily.

Dee was right. Mac was gay as shit.

**18**

Mac and Charlie slept over the night before Dennis left for college. Like most other special occasions, this called for getting blasted on Dennis’s parents’ pricey booze. He also stole a few Vicodin pills from his mom, but Mac didn’t take one. Vicodin made him feel like he was sinking into the floor and suffocating. Dennis and Charlie popped off on them though, which made Charlie knock out on the floor shortly after. Charlie usually slept on the floor when they had sleepovers; he peed the bed when he got drunk and it was gross.

Dennis was handling his pills much better than Charlie did. He stared into space, red-eyed and Zen. Mac leaned his head on his shoulder, intermittently taking swigs of champagne from the bottle.

“What are you lookin at?”

“So empty in here,” said Dennis. “I feel. . .I feel it.” He patted his chest.

When Dennis talked like this, he liked to be touched. Mac put his arm around Dennis’s shoulder, and pulled him closer.

“It’s alright buddy. College, right? You get to go to college. Get a lot of chicks.”

Dennis smiled. “I’ll get probably every girl there. And be popular. . .so many friends, dude. Probably the most popular guy there.” He hiccupped. “Then I won’t feel. . .” he patted his chest again.

“Empty?”

“Yeah,” breathed Dennis.

The two of them sat in silence for a while, legs dangling off the bed. They passed the champagne back and forth like they had so many times before. It occurred to Mac that this might be the last time they ever did this. This house wasn’t Dennis’s home anymore.

Mac tilted his head so that his nose was buried in Dennis’s shoulder. He smelled like home, more than his own home ever had. Sometimes he daydreamed about the two of them living together, as happy as two messed up people could be. They would touch like this all the time, whenever they needed it. Maybe they would kiss, chaste like family. Dennis was on to much bigger and brighter things than that though, Mac was sure of it.

“Mac. . .why do you believe in God?”

Dennis was always asking him questions that nobody else did.

“Cause. . .I think there has to be a point. Life sucks but when you put up with it and you do all the things like God says, when you put in your time, then you get rewarded forever,” he said. “Why do you believe in God?”

“I don’t,” said Dennis. He drained the rest of the champagne, and didn’t say anything else the rest of the night.

**19**

The girl he brought back to his room that night was incredible. Gorgeous soft hair, large, heaving breasts, red lipstick that he could feel smearing on his face as she kissed him. He didn’t even have to talk her into having sex with him; she just wanted to bang right away with no resistance at all. She was writhing on top of him, slinky dress tossed on the floor and it was good. It was _so_ good.

It was supposed to be good, anyway.

She reached down his briefs, and started rubbing on his cock.

“You’re so hot,” she said, slurring a little. They had met at a frat party that was still going on downstairs. The alcohol, by all logic, should have been making this even better. Dennis could tell that she was good at what she was doing, all in all a real catch of a woman. He should have been loving this.

After a few minutes of her working his dick, she said, “Are you gonna get it up, or-“

“Keep going,” said Dennis. “I’m just a little drunk is all.”

He wasn’t drunk enough to not have a boner right now.

She shimmied his underwear down to his ankles, giving him a sexy gaze. “Let me try this,” she said. Her mouth engulfed Dennis’s flaccid dick, and she hollowed out her cheeks, sucking hard. She licked up and down the shaft, again, very skillfully. After a few minutes of this not working either, she stopped trying. Dennis’s heart began beating very fast. His dick wasn’t working. His dick didn’t work.

“What the hell, dude? What’s going on?”

Dennis closed his eyes, not wanting to look at his failure anymore. “Just get out.”

“Are you gay or something? Is that what this is all about?”

He opened his eyes, sat up, and glared at her. “GET OUT OF HERE. GET OUT.”

She gave him a disgusted look, and picked up her clothes off the floor. “Fine,” she said, pulling on her dress. “You don’t have to be so rude about it.”

“Get out,” said Dennis again, covering his eyes with his hand. “Get out.”

She slammed the door behind her when she left. Dennis put his hand on his own dick, and began pumping it furiously. He thought of the prettiest girl he ever banged, her long blonde hair and her perfectly round buttocks. He thought of the dude he experimented with that one time, how his soft, dark hair had felt between Dennis’s fingers as he blew him. He thought of Maureen Ponderosa and the warm feelings he used to have when he kissed her in her dad’s Datsun. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

After a while, Dennis gave up. For the first time in a long time, he cried. All this did was make him feel even more mixed up inside, because not even the crying had feelings paired with it. Snot was pooling around his upper lip, his face was coated with tears, and still he felt empty inside.

There was no meaning to life anymore. Not if his dick didn’t work. Like a zombie, he shuffled nude over to his medicine cabinet and pulled out a big bottle of aspirin. He had a flask of crème de menthe in there too, and took it out as well. Then he closed the cabinet, and looked at himself in the mirror.

He looked pathetic and sweaty, the tears and snot drying and crusting on his face. His skin was blotchy and his hair was sticking up in tangles. He was about as far from any goal of physical perfection that he had ever imagined he would one day attain. His dick didn’t even work, his dick, his dick didn’t work-

Dennis punched the mirror and smashed it, glass shattering everywhere. His hand was bleeding but it didn’t matter. He violently unscrewed the cap of the pills, and began taking them by the handful, swallowing them down with the alcohol. When both the flask and the bottle were empty, he dropped them onto the floor, got in his bed, and waited to die.

Eventually he fell asleep, but it wasn’t forever. He awoke in a pool of his own vomit, in pain but very much alive.

Mercifully, he had morning wood. Maybe everything would be ok.


	2. 20-22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was thinking this was only gonna be four chapters, but the third section of this chapter got really long so I'm not sure anymore. I don't really want my chapters to be longer than 2000 words, so we'll see!
> 
> Trigger warning for cigarettes, alcohol, implied eating disorder, general mental illness. Before reading this one (if you haven't already), you might want to read part 2 of the "Checking In" series to get the full context of what is happening when they are both 21.

**20**

Mac was tired of living in his mother’s house. All of his buyers had moved away at the same time, leaving him with zero income. He tried to get a regular job, but his distractedness and angry outbursts combined with his history of dealing meant that on the slight chance he did get hired, he was fired very quickly. It was maddening to not have a place of his own at twenty years old. He often found himself pacing drunkenly, blacking out, and waking up bruised because he tried to fight a piece of furniture or the wall.

He began apartment hunting, even though he couldn’t afford most of the apartments in Philly. Sometimes Charlie tagged along, though he refused to move out of his own mother’s house. Charlie liked not having to pay rent, and his mom did practically everything for him – cooking, cleaning, and laundry all for free. His mom was house-proud and kind of crazy, so it was always pristine too. It wasn’t hard to understand why he didn’t want to move out of paradise.

Eventually, Mac found the cheapest place in the city, a dirty studio apartment for $350 a month. For the security deposit, he sold his bike. After he moved in all his shit, he went to apply for a credit card.

Mac didn’t often go to the bank. The last time he had been inside one had been when he first opened his checking account, a tedious process that made his skin itch just thinking about it. It took him three trips to finally bring the bank all the necessary documents, and he had to wait in long lines every single time. He could tell all of the bankers knew he wasn’t as rich or smart as them before he even opened his mouth to talk. Since then, the only contact he had with them was occasional mail informing him that he had overdrawn his account. All in all, a horrible place with horrible people. However, it was the only way that Mac felt sure he would be able to pay rent until he started dealing successfully again, so it was a necessary evil.

Miraculously, Capitol One gave him a credit card for $1000, no down payment. He left the bank feeling happy and rich, the card burning a hole in his pocket. Mac bought a new bike, a nice one, and groceries that didn’t even come from a can. Maybe, just maybe, over the course of the next month, he bought a gold chain, a qi, a gym membership, apartment decorations, furniture, videogames, and tons of beer too.

At the end of the month, just before rent was due, he went to go buy groceries and his card was declined. Mac still had no source of income and no prospects. In the bathroom of the grocery store, he had a panic attack, heart beating so fast that he was terrified he was going to die right there in the stall. Terrified (and still hungry), he biked as fast as he could back to the apartment that had rent he was never, ever going to be able to pay. When he got home, he cut his card in half and tossed it in the trash. He threw his gold chain and his qi in the bike’s basket, and never returned to that apartment again.

**21**

Dennis never intended to be in the hospital in the first place, but once he was there he didn’t want to leave. Nobody was chasing after him for missed assignments, the people around him weren’t loud, and the colors weren’t too bright. He slept for twenty-four straight hours after the worst of his alcohol poisoning symptoms had subsided. When he opened his eyes, Mac smiled like a child on Christmas morning.

“Hey, buddy!” He had dark circles under his eyes, and his hair was floppy.

“Hey.” Despite not feeling much of anything, Dennis tried to smile for Mac’s benefit. It was pleasant that he was here; it was nice to be cared about.

“It’s a good thing that you have a heart monitor or I would have worried that you were dead. Well, actually I kinda worried anyway and the monitor was a little confusing so I got the nurse to come back here a few times to tell me how it worked in case you died.” Mac frowned at it. “I couldn’t remember whether alive meant flat or up and down.”

“Up and down, dude. When it’s flat, that means the heart has stopped.”

Mac nodded. “See for a while I thought it might be measuring your soul or your brain waves or some shit. I thought maybe your soul was bouncing around in your body and trying to leave.”

Dennis closed his eyes. “I don’t have a soul, Mac.”

“You shouldn’t say stuff like that, Dennis. I’ve been praying to God to make you more better, and he’s not gonna help someone out who is blasphemous.”

Mac’s obsession with religion as the answer to everything was ridiculous, but Dennis didn’t have it in him to start in on that argument. Instead he said, “There’s nothing wrong with me. Just a little alcohol poisoning.”

“Seriously, dude? Are you gonna be like that?”

Dennis opened his eyes, glaring at Mac. “Like what?”

“Pretending that you don’t look tired and sickly and thin and half-dead! What is going on, Dennis?”

 _Nothing new is going on_. _It’s always been like this. It will always be like this._

“I’m in the best physical condition of my life, Mac. I’m in my prime.”

Mac stood up and let out a furious grunt. He kicked the rolling chair he had been sitting in halfway across the room.

“Whatever. See you around, Dennis.” Mac slammed the door behind him.

Dennis didn’t check in with Mac until a week after he was discharged. They didn’t talk about what had happened again.

**22**

Dennis’s graduating class was enormous, and because his last name was R, it took forever for him to finally get his diploma. Despite the long ceremony, Mac managed to (mostly) restrain himself from joking around with Charlie and harassing Dee.  When Dennis’s name was finally called, Mac got something in his eye that made him tear up. Anything was possible for his friend now.

After, Dennis decided against going to any of the parties in favor of hanging out with them. They all piled into Dennis’s sedan, got some hard liquor, knocked Charlie unconscious, and then drove out to the Pennsylvania countryside. Dennis parked the car on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, and together they drank and stared up at the stars.

Halfway through their second bottle of vodka, Mac said, “What are you gonna do now, bro?”

“I was thinking about opening up a bar,” said Dennis. “Booze and girls, dude, like all the time.”

“I’d go there probably every day,” said Mac.

“You’d give us free drinks, right?” said Charlie.

“I’m broke as shit. I want free drinks,” said Mac.

“Me too,” said Dee.

Dennis laughed. “Only if you guys work there with me.”

“Maybe we could all open a bar together,” said Mac, mostly joking. However, Dennis seemed to seriously consider the proposition.

“Yeah, maybe.”

Later, after Charlie and Dee had fallen asleep, Dennis said, “Are you still living with your mom?”

Mac grimaced. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Still saving up money to be a priest,” lied Mac.

“Really?” said Dennis, eyeing him skeptically. “How much do you have saved so far?”

Mac sighed. “Less than zero dollars. I’m in debt.”

“That sucks, dude.” He rummaged around in his pants pocket and extracted a cigarette and a lighter. He tapped one out of the box for himself, and then said to Mac, “Want one?”

“Yeah.” He grabbed one too. Dennis put the cigarette between his lips, and handed the lighter to Mac. “Light me up,” he said through his teeth.

The flame flickered beautifully in the near pitch-black night. It reflected off of Dennis’s eyes, causing them to gleam. He held the lighter to the end of the cigarette, thankful for the lack of wind. Then it turned a fiery red, and Dennis inhaled. On exhale, he muttered, “Fuck.”

Mac didn’t ask Dennis to light his, was perfectly happy doing it on his own, but Dennis took the lighter out of his hand and said, “Let me do you.”

Their faces were close, hands almost touching on the grass. “Yeah, ok.” He put the cigarette between his lips. Dennis’s long, slender fingers flicked the lighter, illuminating his face, angular and handsome up close. He smiled when it caught light, and Mac’s heart pounded nearly out of his chest.

“Thanks, man,” he said after he had composed himself and smoked for a bit.

“I got your back, bro. Dynamic duo all the way,” said Dennis.

Mac rested his head on Dennis’s shoulder the way he used to when they were kids. It was a luxury to be able to be silent together, so they were for a very long time.

When his cigarette was down to a butt, Mac flicked it away and said, “The credit card companies man. . .they blast you in the ass. You spend all their money and they don’t just let you keep having more until you show you can pay them. I needed money to pay rent but I spent it all before rent day and they cut me off.”

Dennis rubbed his shoulder. “That’s generally what happens, buddy.”

“My credit is terrible now. No apartments will take me in.”

Dennis flicked away his cigarette butt too. “We could move in together. It might be nice having a roommate. Do a sort of odd-couple type situation.”

Four years ago he had dismissed this as a pipe-dream, and now Dennis was offering it to him as if it was the natural course that their life would take.

Mac had never been good at restraining his emotions. He kissed Dennis on the mouth, one hand in his hair, and Dennis responded enthusiastically. He tipped backwards and pulled Mac on top of him as if the only thing he had ever wanted was to make out with Mac underneath the stars. With only the vast, awesome darkness of the night sky as company, it felt safe and secret to have this moment to take what he wanted.

When they had tired themselves out from kissing, Mac rolled off of Dennis. Dennis’s arm stayed wrapped around his shoulder. He buried his face in Dennis’s chest and laughed. Dennis laughed too, and Mac could feel it move his chest up and down.

“Yeah dude. I’ll totally move in with you.”


	3. 23-27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of trigger warnings on this chapter. TW: eating disorders, self-harm, substance abuse, rape, panic attacks, brief vomit mention.
> 
> To understand more better what is happening when Mac and Dennis are 26, I would suggest reading that excerpt from 'hang your hat at somebody else's house.' The excerpt from when Dennis is 27 is what happens when Dennis gets home after being sexually assaulted by those guys in the pilot. I have never been sexually assaulted so if I fucked up here feel free to tell me.
> 
> Side note: I am trying to line up ages as best as I can to the original stories, and by that I mean I'm backtracking and changing the ages slightly in 'hang your hat. . .' I chose those ages randomly, so it doesn't really matter all that much that I moved one forward a year and one back a year. But for clarity: Dennis went to the hospital when he was 21 which is also when Mac started checking in every day, and he had a severe dissociative episode when he was 26. 
> 
> Finally, the title comes from Motion City Soundtrack's "Everything is Alright." I keep forgetting to mention that.

**23**

Mac’s near-constant presence since he moved in was one of the best goddamn things that had ever happened to Dennis. Sure he was bossy, and his room smelled like dirty gym socks, but he also helped to assuage some of the terrible loneliness that had permeated the last four years. Dennis felt empty a lot of the time, and still found the world too harsh and abrasive, but things were better. Not _good_ , but close enough.

Charlie, Dennis, and Mac opened a bar together, and allowed Dee to bartend. Dennis was the one who got the loan to open it; he was the only person with good credit. It was nice to own something, to have stability there too. He was never really alone anymore; the bar became as much his home as their apartment. Not as many girls came to the Paddy’s as he would have liked, but that was ok. He had a system by now to get girls anytime, anywhere.

Dennis started eating again, and as much as he hated to admit it, that made him feel better too. He felt stronger, warmer. Mac helped – he liked grocery shopping, and sometimes he noticed when Dennis hadn’t eaten in a while. Plus, Mac had his own unique eating habits, with his concerns about the protein content and toxins in everything. It was helpful to know that Mac thought about what he ate, that he wasn’t just constantly shoving garbage into his face and expecting Dennis to do the same. It was safe to eat in front of Mac, and eventually, in front of his other friends too.

They spent their time away from the bar drinking in their apartment and playing board games. Mac was funny when he lost, red-faced and indignant, and the games often ended with him overturning the board. The two of them argued about nothing, and watched reruns of old sitcoms and movies on tv while sitting too close on the couch. There was always alcohol in the apartment, hard liquor and beer, and often they drank before five o clock, pretending to jab each other over the alcohol problem neither of them would ever kick.

Sometimes they kissed, drunk on vodka and each other.

Sometimes they had sex that they didn’t talk about the morning after.

Sometimes when Dennis lost control, broke things, or cried, Mac held him close and didn’t ask questions.

2000 was a decent year. When Mac and Dennis kissed in Paddy’s Y2K bunker midnight of New Year’s 2001, Dennis wished for another year that would be exactly the same.

**24**

On September 11, 2001, Mac sat down on the couch with his cereal, turned on the tv, and saw burning buildings. He changed the channel, but it was on all of them. Every time he flicked to a new station, all he heard was ‘foreign terrorists,’ ‘World Trade Center,’ and ‘attack.’

“Dennis! Dennis!” he shouted at his still sleeping roommate.

Dennis stumbled out of bed, and opened up the door grumpily. “What is it?”

Mac pointed to the tv, heart pounding fast. “Look.”

“Oh shit,” said Dennis, his eyes widening. He walked over to the couch, and sat down next to Mac. “What the fuck is that?”

“Terrorists dude. Coming to get everyone.”

“. . .No one knows if this is the last of the attacks. . .” said the television.

“Shit. Do you think they’re coming for Philadelphia?” said Dennis.

“This is the birthplace of America. We have the Liberty bell. Dennis, we’re gonna die,” said Mac. His chest hurt and he felt himself getting tunnel vision. Dennis grabbed his hand.

“Stay with me, baby boy.”

Mac nodded, calming slightly. “We should probably invite Charlie over to tell him what’s going on. He doesn’t have a TV.”

“I’ll call Dee too. If we all die because this part of Philly gets hit, I don’t want her outliving us.”

Dennis pulled out a large box of beers from the fridge. He took one out of the case, and pounded half of it back. Mac smiled.

“Good idea. If we die, I wanna go down drinking.”

**25**

When Dennis came home from grocery shopping, Mac was curled up on the floor, sitting with his forehead touching his knees. In his hand, he held a letter.

“Buddy. . .what’s going on over there?” he said, putting away the milk.

“The credit card company found me,” said Mac.

“Oh, shit. How much do you owe ‘em?”

Mac burst into tears, and didn’t answer. Dennis had rarely ever seen Mac cry. It was incredibly uncomfortable.

“That bad, huh?” he said awkwardly. After he finished putting away the groceries, he pulled the letter out of his sobbing friend’s hand. “Wow, that’s a lot of money.”

“I don’t know how I’m ever gonna pay it,” said Mac. Dennis got down on his knees, and rubbed his friend’s back. He looked at the cost again, and sighed.

“I think we could wheedle this out of my parents.”

Mac’s face lit up like the sun, and he looked at Dennis with a sort of reverence. “Really?”

Dennis nodded. “If not, I could find a way to steal it.”

He was tackled to the ground with a kiss.

**26**

Dennis had been acting really weird all day. He seemed disoriented, and snapped at whoever talked to him. When Mac tried to sling his arm around Dennis’s shoulder, he tensed up and glared at him. It was unsurprising when Dennis announced around eleven that he was going home early due to being sick. However, he didn’t check in the rest of the night, not even to tell Mac he had gotten home. Out of worry, Mac ended up leaving early too.

The apartment was eerily quiet when he got back. He knocked on Dennis’s door, but no one answered.

“Dennis. . .buddy. . .you home?”

Again, no answer. He knew better than to barge into Dennis’s bedroom unannounced, so he tried to brush his worries out of his mind, and went to the bathroom to take a leak. When he opened the door, he found Dennis passed out in his underwear on the linoleum floor.

It smelled like vomit, which was unsurprising for a sick person. What wasn’t expected were the burn marks on Dennis’s thighs, five of them that looked serious. In his right hand, he held a lighter. Dennis had burned himself.

_We found him passed out in his room and had to call an ambulance. . ._

Mac got down on his knees, heart racing, and waved his hand over Dennis’s mouth to see if he was still breathing. He sighed with relief when he felt Dennis’s breath.

“Dennis?” said Mac. He pinched his arm. “Dennis!”

Dennis winced in pain, and his eyes fluttered open. “Mac. . .what’s going on?”

“You’re sleeping in our bathroom.”

“Gross,” said Dennis, wrinkling his nose.

“Do you have the flu or something?” asked Mac. Dennis hoisted himself up onto his elbows, and blinked hard several times. He frowned thoughtfully for a moment as if trying to remember what had happened, and then his face hardened.

“Yeah. It’s super awful, dude.”

Mac wanted to ask what was up with the lighter, but the look on Dennis’s face stopped him. This wasn’t the flu, and asking about it was as off-limits now as those questions he had asked Dennis in the hospital so many years ago.

_What in the goddamn hell, Dennis?_

_Move past it._

Instead of asking all of the questions running through his mind, he went out to the kitchen, and got Dennis a glass of water. As he handed it to him, he said, “Make sure you drink a lot of water until you’re not sick anymore.”

Dennis took the glass and downed it. Then he got to his feet, and looked at Mac, broken and tired. He wrapped his arms around his friend, holding him tightly.

“Thanks, buddy,” he breathed into Mac’s ear.

**27**

The first thing he did when he found his way home from that disgusting apartment full of perverts was shower. There was gunk crusted on various parts of his body, and he tried to not think too hard about what it might be. He just scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, far past a point that was logically necessary. Somehow, he ended up on the shower floor, staring into space as the cold water rained down.

Paddy’s Pub couldn’t be a gay bar anymore. He really didn’t want to see those guys again or to have them tell their friends that he was fair game to do whatever he couldn’t remember that he had done the night before. On inspecting his body, it was clear that no one had been inside him, and he wanted to keep it that way. Who knew what kind of foul diseases they might have had. The thought of it just made him nauseous.

He finally made his way out of the shower, and toweled off. Then, he leaned over the sink, braced his hands against it, and looked at himself in the mirror. The face that greeted him looked distressed, weak. The ever present hole in his chest grew, swallowed more of him than it had in years.

_It was just an experiment. You’ve slept with plenty of girls who were blackout drunk and they had a good time. The best sexual experience of their life. There’s plenty of other drunk sex you’ve had that you barely remember._

He touched his chin, his cheeks. They were soft, round, and feminine. It was a face that was itching to be taken advantage of. The thought of having his angles back was comforting. He would look chiseled again, a perfect statue to be admired, a handsome king to be feared.

After he got dressed, he threw away all of the junk food in the house. He started a new notebook for calorie counting, and decided to buy makeup that would emphasize his more masculine and regal features until they reappeared on their own.

Everything was going to be ok.


	4. 28-35

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It ended up being four chapters after all!
> 
> Trigger warning: eating disorders, alcoholism, toxic codependency, substance abuse, delusions, death of a parent, internalized homophobia, vomit. If you have an eating disorder I would highly recommend being in a good state before reading 33 and 34.

**28**

Dennis cut foods out of his diet one by one, and then he stopped eating for three days. Dennis got addicted to crack cocaine for kicks, and then shivered in their living room for weeks instead of going to rehab. Dennis swallowed his sleeping pills with beer and stayed up all night anyway.  Dennis destroyed himself over and over like the answer to all of life’s problems was to jam the reset button as hard as possible. His failures were so flamboyant and ridiculous and dark that they crossed the line into hilarious absurdity.

Mac laughed at Dennis. They laughed at each other. They survived.

**29**

Dennis had always been much closer to his mother than Dee, or at least, she liked him better. Still, when the news came of her death, he didn’t really feel sad. It wasn’t unusual for Dennis to not feel anything, but that wasn’t exactly what happened either. Dennis felt lighter for weeks, months after his mother’s death. It was like a fist had been clenched around his heart, and suddenly it had let go.

One evening shortly after his mom died, he was drinking with Dee in the back room of the bar. Everyone else had gone home, but they had stayed late to close up. They were sprawled out on the floor, passing a bottle of vodka back and forth. This was old hat by now; they had been doing this together for as long as Dennis could remember. The two of them were wasted and fourteen again, only this time they didn’t have to worry that mom would find out.

“Hey Dee?” said Dennis.

“Mmm?” said Dee, taking another swig of the vodka.

“How do you feel about mom dying?”

Dee suppressed a burp. “I’m glad that old bitch is dead.” She passed the bottle back to him.

Dennis nodded, and took the vodka from her. “Me too.”

**30**

They had a party when Mac turned thirty, a real smash-em-up celebration with Red Bull-absinthe cocktails and broken furniture. Paddy’s cleared out by midnight because most of Philadelphia didn’t know how to have a real party. Charlie lit a barstool on fire, and they all roasted marshmallows around it. Even Dennis ate more than one.

Frank, Charlie, and Dee went home first, stumbling drunk through the city streets at around three in the morning. Mac and Dennis stayed behind; they usually went home together. It was nice knowing someone would be there if he passed out or puked in the street. Most nights they held hands. Sometimes they kissed sloppily against crumbling buildings and in alleyways. Dennis smelled nice when he was wasted, a slightly sweet smell mixing with whatever alcohol he had drunk. It was familiar by now; it had always been his home.

The two of them were lying on the floor next to the charred barstool, and staring up at the ceiling. Dennis reached out to grab his hand; he always got very handsy when he was drunk. Mac reciprocated, and stroked his palm with his thumb.

“Oh. . .dude. I still feel those stigmata we gave you,” said Mac. In the moment, it hadn’t seemed like it would scar.

“Hurt like a bitch,” said Dennis. “Still does.” He blinked hard. “I still see stuff too sometimes. Stuff that other people can’t see.”

“Like hallucinating?” said Mac.

“I’m not crazy,” Dennis shouted at the ceiling. “I’m not. I’m not crazy.”

He squeezed Dennis’s hand. “Easy, dude. Maybe you’re just, I don’t know, some sort of prophet or something.” That didn’t seem right. “A prophet of Satan.” Much better.

“Satan isn’t real, Mac.”

“Seems like something a prophet of Satan would say.”

“Sometimes I’m not even sure if _I’m_ real,” said Dennis quietly.

“What, like in _The Matrix_ or some shit?”

Dennis sighed. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s go home.”

**31**

Dennis wasn’t flourishing, it was true, but ditching Mac made the hole inside of him grow exponentially larger. It was confusing to be without him, like losing a limb. Still, Dee was right. It wasn’t normal for Mac to have this much sway over his delicate ecosystem this late in life. Dennis knew that one day a wife was supposed to peel his apples for him, that he was supposed to move on from his bromance someday. He was just waiting for the right woman who would plug up his God hole and cause him to have feelings again. It was only a matter of time.

Unlike Mac, he definitely wasn’t gay. The very idea was ridiculous. He just needed to be settled down with _someone_ , and Mac would suffice for now. If sometimes Mac breathed ‘I love you’ into his mouth when they fucked, if maybe that made his hole smaller for a few days, if he sometimes wondered if he could ever truly feel love at all, well –

It didn’t matter.

**32**

After the marriage and divorce fiasco had died down, Mac went to confession for the first time in years. He sat down in the confessional, and breathed a shuddering breath.

“Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been uh. . .a really long time since my last confession. I accuse myself of one sin” He swallowed. “Homosexuality.”

“Can you explain further?”

Mac’s heart raced, and his eyesight became blurry, but he pressed on. “Over the course of the past ten years I have been doing sexual things with my best friend. I never thought it was gay, because I felt like it would stop one day once we both found women to marry and bang. It was just to keep us more pure. I mean, I still had sex with women anyway, but no premarital sex with anyone who I thought would be my wife. Then a tranny who I used to bang called me gay. I feel confused, Father. Have I sinned in the eyes of God all these years?”

“Yes, my son.”

Mac buried his face in his hands. “How do I fix it?”

“First, just know that you are not a homosexual. You merely succumbed to temptation, as do all of us, for we are all sinners.”

Mac’s heart rate slowed. “Yes Father.”

“It is ok to have homosexual thoughts, so long as you never act on them. This will be difficult, but it is not impossible. We all have our struggles. Devotion to the Lord helps to rid the mind of temptations and accept true love into our hearts.”

“I can – I can do that.”

“Your penance is a decade of the Rosary so that you’ll grow in the virtue of temperance. Now please make an Act of Contrition.”

It was hard to remember after so many years, but Mac tried his best. “O my God, I am very sorry for having offended you, and, uh, I detest all my sins, because, um, I dread the loss of heaven . . .something about hell . . .  but most of all because they offend God, Who is good.”

“I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father and of Son and of the Holy Spirit. Go in peace.”

For the next several years, most of his weekly confessions were about the exact same thing.

**33**

Almost overnight, Mac became fucking disgusting. He looked like shit. He smelled like shit. He carried around junk food everywhere, sometimes literally in garbage bags, and expected Dennis to eat it. It was painful to watch him eat, to see him suddenly not give a shit about the trash he was constantly shoving into his face. It wasn’t safe to eat in front of Mac anymore, so he avoided it whenever it was possible.

He didn’t kiss Mac anymore, and didn’t hold his hand. When he was so fucking horny that he couldn’t stand it, he got Mac to blow him and didn’t return the favor. At night, he dreamed of Mac expanding until he exploded and killed the both of them. Sometimes he woke in a cold sweat and vomited. He kept a trash can by his bed ever since the first nightmare made him puke on the floor.

Dennis was cracking on the inside like ice crushed by a boot. Mac’s fatness was infecting him like a virus, hijacking his body to deprive it of nutrients, making his hair fall out. Something had to give.

When he lost control at the High School Reunion, he knew he never wanted anyone to see him like that again. It was time to take control in his life, to find new ways to fill his hole. He was the master of his own fucking universe; everyone else was just a pawn.

He bought some Mexican ephedra, and decided to start with Mac.

**34**

They fucked after that fateful monthly dinner for the first time in a year, bareback and hard with Mac on top. It had been so long since he had been inside Dennis that he came in about three minutes, way before his partner did. After he pulled out, he jerked off Dennis, rough and unlubricated. Dennis liked pain. He looked right in Mac’s eyes, and Mac took his chance. Before Dennis came, he let go. Dennis moaned in complaint, and tried to pull his hand back. Mac swatted Dennis’s hand away.

“I know about the size pills,” he said.

Dennis’s eyes widened. “What?”

“I know about the goddamn size pills. You fucked with my body.” His voice was shaking.

Dennis narrowed his eyes. “Oh for Christ sake. You’re not on them anymore. What does it matter?”

Mac slapped him in the face. “You fucked with my body! I’m not a fucking toy! Apologize!”

“How about how you fucked with my body, huh?” said Dennis. He pulled away from Mac, sitting up and pressing his hands against the bed as if he was ready to pounce. “Your fatness stole things from me that took _months_ to get back. I lost hair! I’m still cold all the time!”

“What the fuck are you talking about? All of those things happened because you didn’t eat!”

Dennis looked feral, terrifying. He stared off into space, and didn’t respond.

_I still see stuff too sometimes. Stuff that other people can’t see._

_It doesn’t matter._

Mac took a shuddering breath. “Look . . . just don’t do it again, ok? And I. . .I promise to not tack on mass like that on purpose again.”

 “You promise?” said Dennis, looking down at his knees.

“I promise. But if you fuck with my body again, that’s it for the dynamic duo. I mean it.”

Dennis laid down again, staring at the ceiling. “I’m going to sleep.” He looked at Mac, eyes as unfathomable as ever. “You should . . . you should stay.”

After a moment of consideration, Mac nodded and laid back down too. Dennis rolled over and spooned him so tight it felt like a suction.

“I meant what I said before. That the world is safer when you’re around,” Dennis breathed into Mac’s ear. “But it’s also . . . it’s not safe when you aren’t yourself.”

They were both broken, but it was ok. They could be broken together.

**35**

Mac and Dennis were drinking in their apartment and watching old sitcoms on TV. It was familiar, comfortable. Dennis held a beer in one hand and Mac’s hand in his other hand; there had been a hundred, a thousand days like this. Twenty years of holding hands and drinking, and the vast, impenetrable future ahead of them to keep doing the same.

Dennis had an alcohol problem and so did Mac and it wove into their history, into the fabric of their relationship. He could no more pinpoint the day he became an alcoholic than the day that he became sure that this was the future he wanted. Their relationship was alcoholic; it was needy and constant, and leaving caused nothing but pain and withdrawal. It was fucked, really; they were fucking doomed. One day they would rot from the inside out and be buried together in a haphazard grave. No one would come to their funeral.

_It has always been like this. It will always be like this._

When they kissed, it lasted for an eternity.


End file.
